Russ Buettner

Russ Buettner is a reporter on the Metro desk, specializing in investigative and computer-assisted reporting.

In 2011, he worked on a series of articles with colleague Danny Hakim highlighting abuse, neglect and deadly mistakes in New York’s system of caring for developmentally disabled people.

The series also showed how the system had made millionaires of nonprofit executives, one of whom billed his Medicaid-financed nonprofit $50,000 to help his daughter buy a Manhattan co-op while she attended graduate school.

In April 2012, the series was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. The Pulitzer board said the series “revealed rapes, beatings and more than 1,200 unexplained deaths over the past decade of developmentally disabled people in New York State group homes, leading to removal of two top officials, movement to fire 130 employees and passage of remedial laws.”

Mr. Buettner’s other work at The Times included articles that led to the criminal investigation of a City Council member and covered Rudolph W. Giuliani as the former New York City mayor pursued the Republican nomination for president.

Mr. Buettner joined The New York Times in 2006.

He previously worked as an investigative reporter for The Daily News from 1995 to 2006, at New York Newsday from 1992 to 1995, and as a staff reporter at the Amador-Ledger Dispatch, in Jackson, Calif., in 1990.

While at The Daily News, Mr. Buettner’s investigation of Bernard B. Kerik, then President George W. Bush’s nominee to become secretary of Homeland Security, first revealed the issues of corruption that led to Mr. Kerik’s criminal prosecution.

The Kerik articles came at the end of Mr. Buettner’s multi-year investigation of Mr. Kerik’s tenure at the New York City Department of Correction that had led to the resignation of another correction commissioner and the criminal prosecution of two other high-ranking correction officials.

His series at The Daily News in 2000 exposed the state’s most sued doctors, leading several practitioners to leave medicine and to the passage of a law that opened doctors’ malpractice histories. The series received a National Headliner Award for Public Service.

He graduated from California State University, Sacramento, and attended the University of Missouri Graduate School of Journalism.

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Mr. Heastie was able to hold onto a home that prosecutors said his mother had bought with embezzled money; selling it years later brought what appears to be the only significant financial gain of his life.